High performance computer systems may utilize multiple processors to increase processing power. The workload may be divided and distributed among the processors thereby reducing execution time and increasing performance. An architectural model for high performance multiprocessor system may be a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) system.
Under the NUMA model, system resources, such as processors and random access memory, may be segmented into groups or units referred to as Resource Affinity Domains (RADs). Thus, each RAD may comprise one or more processors and associated physical memory. A processor in a RAD may access the memory assigned to its RAD, referred to as local memory referencing, or a processor may access memory assigned to other RADs. Non-local memory references may carry a performance penalty. Thus, computer system performance may be increased if non-local memory references can be reduced.